“There’s a man out there,” says William Shatner’s character in the well-known “Twilight Zone” episode where he sees a creature on the wing of an airplane he is in.

This Thursday, passengers on a flight that landed at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago had a similar experience when a man opened the plane’s emergency exit and slid down its wing. The man, Randy Frank Davila, 57, of California, has been charged with reckless conduct, said a Sun Times Media Wire report.

“I think everybody was just, kind of, a little surprised,” passenger Marry Ellen Eagleston told NBC News of the surreal experience. “Did we really see what we really saw?”

It was around 4:30 a.m. and the aircraft was on a runway, approaching the gate, when Davila decided to take his stroll on the wing, according to Chicago police. Even emergency responders sounded shocked.

“There was no real risk of an accident here – it’s certainly a sign that behavior is deteriorating in ways very scary ways to all on board,” said Dr. Joe Schwieterman, a professor at DePaul University in Chicago and an expert in the fields of public policy, transportation and urban planning.

Unruly passenger reports increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and hit record highs last year, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Overall, there were 1,099 unruly passenger investigations in 2021. This year, unruly passenger investigations have decreased but are still much higher than previous years – there have already been more than 400 investigations, more than the pre-pandemic record of 310 in 2004.

According to a report published this February in The Washington Post, airplane passengers have repeatedly “terrified other passengers” with attempts to open emergency exit doors on planes over the past year. For example, last March, a Spirit Airlines flight was diverted to Denver on Wednesday after a passenger appeared to try to open an emergency exit door, according to officials cited by NBC News.

This year, a Portland man was hit with federal charges after attempting to open an emergency exit on a commercial airline flight from Salt Lake City, Utah to Portland, said a press release from the Department of Justice. In February, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants also tweeted about a passenger who attempted to open the forward passenger door on a flight.

Today, we witnessed another dangerous, life-threatening incident on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles, CA, to Washington, D.C., when a passenger attempted to open the forward passenger door...1/3

Experts consulted by The Washington Post echoed Schwieterman’s comment about attempts to open emergency doors on planes being “scary” behavior.

“Messing with the door on an aircraft that’s in flight is unsafe, dangerous and is an attack on an airplane,” said Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines captain and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents the carrier’s pilots. “Let me be clear: This is an attack on an airplane from within. Though it would not be successful because of the engineering, it is still a threat.”

While Davila did not attempt to open the door while the plane was in flight, his actions were disruptive enough to land him in police custody. His next court appearance is scheduled for June 27.